Stephen Farnsworth
Stephen Farnsworth
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The Democratic Party has long thought that its success is dependent on some support in the South.
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Virginia prides itself on having a part-time legislature, and so I don't think it's particularly likely that this is going to change.
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There's no question that special interests get their money's worth - either in Washington or Richmond. For ordinary citizens, that means that somebody else is at the front of the line when the government is lawmaking.
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The presidential-nomination system favors the unemployed or the underemployed over the fully employed.
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There is a significant interest in letting elected officials represent their constituents as they see fit. And so I don't think that any effort that would limit how many bills a lawmaker could introduce or that sort of thing would necessarily get very far.
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Although their ideologies are very different, the strategy Howard Dean employed could be the strategy Mark Warner employs. Basically camp out in Iowa and New Hampshire and go door to door, church supper to church supper, to make himself a household name in those states.
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I think the future is going to look a lot like the past. Virginia muddles through with relatively short legislative sessions, and if lawmakers introduce too many bills for the legislature to consider, the ones that aren't going to pass anyway are thrown overboard.
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I think Allen has to be at the top of everyone's expectations right now.
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His business experience and his connections to Mark Warner could put him in good stead with Democratic Party voters.
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The full-disclosure system has an advantage in that people have a sense of what their lawmakers are getting. But the wide-ranging ability of lawmakers to receive gifts from private interests is not something that goes in the direction of good government.
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The truth is that it is profitable for private interests to give things to lawmakers. And if it weren't, they wouldn't give them. If it were not profitable for them to put some of their resources in the pockets of lawmakers, they wouldn't do it.
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Allen, although a favorite, may have a more serious challenger, in part because of the issues going on. The questions surrounding Iraq, the questions surrounding abortion, the hostility that many Democrats toward President Bush, could all generate high Democratic turnout.
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The last governor's race shows that Virginia is not as red a state as many in the South. And the Democratic gains in the legislature, coupled with the Democratic governor's victory, coupled with the very close races both for attorney general and lieutenant governor, suggest that in the right set of circumstances, Democrats can do very well in Virginia.
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In many ways, this could be a replay of 1996 - a businessman with substantial party support going up against a popular incumbent, who does well enough in losing that he will be able to run for the Senate in 2008 or the governor's mansion in 2009.